Conclusions

In general, market development has not resulted in improved
welfare for extractors because of both the sociopolitical factors and the
aviamento-based production and marketing systems. Nor has an increase in the
value of the standing forest, even when based on less risky domestic markets,
necessarily resulted in safeguarding the resource, as the babaçu case study
shows.

Essentially this is because market development has taken place in
a socio-economic and policy context (of frontier expansion, and resource
privatization) inimical to the welfare of extractors and resource conservation,
a situation not helped by hyper-inflation which erodes earnings from forest
products, encourages extractors to invest in livestock, and results in falling
real interest rates for competing land uses. On the positive side should be
noted the recent Brazilian policy changes on roadbuilding and cattle ranching
incentives.

Most analysts (Anderson, Browder, Homma, Torres and Martine, and
Cleary) seem to agree that extractive products are likely to remain marginal in
the search for sustainable natural resource management systems in the Amazon
region. Rubber and Brazil nuts in particular are undergoing a gradual, probably
terminal, decline in their role as the basis of extractive economies in many
areas. Other important products like babaçu oil (undergoing substitution), açai
juice (affected in the market by cholera), and rosewood oil (suffering
depletion) have also recently diminished in importance in extractive economies.

Homma (1989) sees substitution as inevitable due to the inability
of extractivism to respond to the need of the market for a constant, uniform
product with an elastic supply. Rubber and Brazil nuts therefore fit into the
historical boom and bust cycle that has characterized internationally traded
extractive products over the centuries. Products for local and national market
are far less prone to these consequences.

There are therefore major fears for the economic viability of
extractive reserves if based solely or even mainly on extractivism. Unless
extractor groups can successfully diversify into other sustainable uses of the
forest, the outcome is likely to be increased clearance for subsistence
agriculture and cash cropping, followed by migration when the soils lose their
fertility. The loss of extractivists means loss of the knowledge base for
sustainable forest use.

There are strong arguments to focus future efforts on the
development of multiple product forest management in extractive reserves, which
provide the tenure and institutional basis in which such resource use changes
can equitably take place. Anderson (1992) argues for a research and policy
agenda aimed at transforming extractive reserves into viable enterprises. There
seems to be a high potential both for sustainable yield timber management and
NTFP production in the context of agroforestry systems based on indigenous
swidden farming practices.

The danger of market-induced extractivism is that it can lead
forest peoples into narrowing their livelihood base. This is likely to cause
adverse welfare and resource impacts in the longer term. Thus the market
development of extractive products should take place within an integrated
approach in which the diversity and interdependence of livelihood activities is
centrally important (Cleary, 1992).

Finally, if the North wants relatively environmentally benign
extractivism to continue, and therefore satisfy its priority of biodiversity
conservation (a priority only partially shared by extractor populations and
Amazonian governments) it may have to find a way of adequately remunerating the
users.

Although there is a consensus that expectations have been
overstated, support for extractivism is still the necessary short-term
palliative while the longer term approach of diversification of forest
management is developed, since there are no immediately accessible sustainable
forest management alternatives for extractive
populations.